Forgotten Stories of the Eugenic Age #4, Part 3: The Blurry Boundaries of Eugenic Infanticide

[Forgotten Stories of the Eugenic Age is a blog series exploring the lesser-known ways that eugenics affected and engaged American lives during the first half of the twentieth century.]

[Parts 1 and 2 tell the story of Dr. Harry Haiselden’s refusal of life-saving surgery for a baby with disabilities, whom he believed would be a burden on society, and the ensuing controversy.]

While public debate about the Baby Bollinger case subsided, Harry Haiselden continued to work as a physician. He diversified his eugenic medical practices to include sterilizations, and claimed to have personally sterilized nearly 400 patients in Chicago by late 1915.

In addition to sterilizations, Haiselden was called to consult on cases throughout the country to decide whether “defective” infants should receive operations or be allowed to die. Sometimes Haiselden decreed that a baby’s health issues could be corrected satisfactorily through surgery, especially if the baby appeared to be of “bright” intellect. At other times, as Haiselden told news reporters, if he found a child to be a “hopeless idiot,” he would “unhesitatingly advise that it be permitted to die.”

In July 1917, Haiselden once again approached newspapers, this time to report his recommendation that another three children be permitted to die. He explained that Baby Meter, who had already died at one day old by the time stories went to print, had been missing part of her upper skull case and had what appeared to be a small, malformed brain. “When I saw the baby, I knew it had lived too long already,” he said. He concluded that allowing the child to survive would be a crime against the race; letting the child die would be a “favor.” As in the Baby Bollinger case, Haiselden claimed that fifteen other doctors had agreed with his assessment, although again he provided no names.

Baby Mattys was five months old, paralyzed, and had an “incurably affected” head. Haiselden estimated that surgery could prolong the child’s life by a year or two, but said that the parents had agreed to let the child die now. Neither the Baby Meter nor the Baby Mattys case garnered much attention in the press. The third baby for whom Haiselden had recommended death did not receive any news coverage at all.

However, another case that emerged in November 1917 revived controversy, almost exactly two years after Baby Bollinger’s brief life and death.

Two-and-a-half-year-old Paul Hodzima had a microcephalous head and severe breathing difficulties due to a tracheal obstruction. Haiselden prescribed the child drugs that he said would both ease his pain and cause him to lose his appetite so he would starve to death. He asserted that his actions had an altruistic purpose in addition to “saving” the race from another defective child. The drugs would permit the baby’s exhausted, distressed mother to focus her attentions on her other child, who “is normal in every way.”

Perhaps for the first time, Haiselden himself used the word “euthanasia” to describe his work. He said of his decision in the Hodzima case, “Euthanasia or painless killing by God-given drugs relieves the old pain and takes away the horror of death," which arrives within a week to a month. He extolled the benefits of morphine in treating “lives of no value and bodies in constant pain” that, by existing, “check the vitality of others.”

Chicago coroner Peter Hoffman, who had expressed ambivalence in the Bollinger case two years prior, seemed to find this case more distasteful. He warned Haiselden that he would present him to a grand jury and ask for an indictment if the drugs caused the baby's death. Ever seeking the spotlight, Haiselden replied that he would welcome such an action because it would give him the opportunity to “enlighten the public on many things.” Even so, he thought that his critics should “devote their attention to the scores of automobile murders, the abortions, the daily street murders, and similar unchecked crimes against persons who have every right to live,” unlike Paul Hodzima, who had no such right.

Other doctors spoke out against Haiselden's actions. They argued that Hodzima’s pain could be alleviated without condemning him to death. They protested that a physician did not have the right to directly cause death, even if they agreed that it was morally acceptable to “passively” let death occur as an act of nature or divinity. Though some commentators, like W. D. Brooke of Oakland, expressed “outspoken and unqualified approval” of Haiselden’s actions in the Hodzima case on the grounds that a defective individual is incapable of “attaining the social position of her naturally-formed sisters and brothers,” these views surfaced more rarely. To most critics, allowing a baby—especially one they perceived as never really human, never truly alive—to “fade away” was one thing. Poisoning a toddler was another.

The clear demarcations that Haiselden supporters saw between allowing “nature” to take a baby's life and committing murder were evidently not so obvious to others. Shortly after the Baby Bollinger case, Mrs. James F. Darcey of St. Louis told newspapers that she had written a letter to Dr. Haiselden about her six-year-old son who had been labeled defective and currently lived in a city sanatorium. She wrote, “I worry so over him. I would be glad if he were to die. Now, is there any way that he could die, or do you think that there is any cure for such children?” Mrs. Darcey added, “I wouldn’t want to kill him, of course, but I would rather have him dead than in his present condition.”

Other parents seemed unable to distinguish between the “incurable” and “curable” defectiveness Haiselden traveled the nation diagnosing. On July 28, 1917, shortly after Haiselden’s announcement about the determined fates of the three “defective” babies, a father urged surgeons at the Jewish Maternity Hospital in New York not to operate on his newborn son, who had unspecified health problems. Physicians overrode the father’s wishes, believing that the baby had an excellent chance at a complete recovery. Yet according to the baby’s doctors, the father, a supporter of Dr. Haiselden, apparently “could not grasp that this case was different” than the others.

With clamor over the Hodzima case, a police officer went to the child’s home and confiscated the drug his mother had been administering. Haiselden then had the child removed to the hospital. Nothing more is known about the fate of Baby Hodzima, and it appears that despite Coroner Hoffman's threats, Haiselden was never formally charged with a crime.

After Baby Bollinger’s death, biologist Dr. Harold N. Moyer noted in the New York Times, “The public will be educated by this discussion. Those questions must sooner or later come to the attention of the masses.” But the discussion did not persist very long. While the Hodzima case provided a little kindling to temporarily reignite the opposition, after the initial uproar of the Baby Bollinger case waned, Dr. Haiselden’s actions no longer seemed shocking. Just two months after newspapers ceased publishing about the Hodzima case, the New York Times succinctly reported, “Another ‘Haiselden baby,’ so-called, has been permitted to die.” Baby Emma Stanke was two months old and quadriplegic. Inventing yet another questionable boundary, Haiselden remarked that doctors gave the baby “ordinary, human care,” but not “the full benefit of scientific care.” Little else was said of Baby Emma Stanke. There was no public outcry this time.

When Dr. Haiselden died in 1919 of a cerebral hemorrhage while vacationing in Havana, news articles offered little mention of his eugenic preferences or the lives he had allowed “nature” to snuff out. Haiselden once said, “They will criticize me, but I shall have friends too. And some day they will wonder how there could be any criticism.” It seems that in fact a third path was taken: The press apparently forgot that anyone had ever criticized Harry Haiselden.

After Haiselden’s passing, his friend and brother-in-law Dr. Clarendon Rutherford commented, “Every great man is misunderstood, but Dr. Haiselden was maligned. . . . He refused to prostitute his art by prolonging the lives of babies who were born idiots and morons. He was twenty-five years ahead of his time.” Rutherford’s prediction was disturbingly accurate: Child euthanasia became an official program in Nazi Germany in 1939.

The eugenic judgments of Harry Haiselden, other medical and legal professionals, and members of the public relied on moral codes predicated on the imposition of boundaries. Commentators drew boundaries to separate human beings based on determinations of fitness and unfitness, normality and abnormality, and humanity and sub-humanity. Important to these placements were additional boundaries: health and sickness, intelligence and idiocy, and burden and benefit.

With these boundaries set, observers then made additional demarcations to distinguish who had a right to live and who didn't; who was curable and who wasn't; and which conditions or states of being were tolerable, which weren't, and to which gradations.

Then, these boundaries pervaded the medical realm to differentiate “ordinary, human care” from “the full benefit of scientific care” and to determine which actions were acceptable for physicians: intervening to save a life, allowing “nature” to end one, or prescribing drugs to hasten that end. These boundaries also determined what the public should know or discuss. And they facilitated the final determinations—those between inaction, involuntary euthanasia, and murder, and between innocence and guilt.

All the boundaries were blurry. There were many exceptions and no consensus. But their establishment unquestionably engendered the systematic devaluation and dehumanization of people with disabilities. Quite simply, Dr. Harry Haiselden decided not to try to save the lives of several babies with disabilities because he did not believe that those babies should live, and many people supported him. Did the supposed degree of passivity or activity in effecting the outcome of death matter? To borrow the eloquent phrasing of the Los Angeles Times in 1915, Baby John Bollinger “died of inertia,” and inertia is a choice.

Classical eugenics fell into disfavor after the atrocities of the Holocaust. It became less socially acceptable to (openly) refer to persons with disabilities as drains on the vitality of humanity, or to deny them life-saving medical care. But until then, Haiselden’s career contributed to the development of an ethos in which it was normal and unobjectionable for the Chicago Daily Tribune on April 15, 1916, to write of Dr. Haiselden’s latest patient, “Eliza Johnson, the five year old girl who ‘would be better off dead’ because her mental growth stopped when she was but a few months old, is ‘better off.’”

Sources:

1. “17 Doctors Favor Letting Baby Die.” Washington Post, Nov. 16, 1917.
2. Bonsfield, Dr. M. O. “Haiselden Speaks at Appomattox Club.” Chicago Defender, Dec. 4, 1915.
3. Brooke, W. D. “Unqualified Approval of Dr. Haiselden’s Conduct.” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 23, 1917.
4. “Condemns Death Drugging Plan.” Washington Post, Nov. 13, 1917.
5. “Defective Baby Dorothy Cleveland Should Live, Rules Dr. Haiselden.” Washington Post, Mar. 5, 1916.
6. “Doctors Agree Deformed Babe Is Better Dead.” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 16, 1917.
7. “Dr. Haiselden Dead in Cuba.” New York Times, Jun. 20, 1919
8. “Dr. Haiselden of ‘Baby Fame’ Dies in Cuba.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jun. 19, 1919.
9. “Dr. Haiselden to Let Deformed Baby Die.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 22, 1918.
10. “Evanston Girl Dies Under Knife of Dr. Haiselden.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr. 15, 1916.
11. “Haiselden Died Suddenly, Trip Pleasure Jaunt.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jun. 20, 1919.
12. “Haiselden to Sterilize Youth.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 19, 1915.
13. “Lets Afflicted Baby Die: Dr. Haiselden of Chicago Again Refuses to Save a Life-Cripple.” New York Times, Jan. 28, 1918.
14. “Meter Baby Dies; Nature Is Kind, Says Haiselden.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jul. 25, 1917.
15. “Mother Asks Knife to Check Insanity Threat.” Chicago Examiner, Nov. 19, 1915.
16. “Mother of Defective Boy Wishes Him Dead in Letter to Physician.” Washington Post, Dec. 5, 1915.
17. “Mrs. Bollinger Is Dead: Grieved for Deformed Baby Whose Life Was Forfeited.” New York Times, Jul. 29, 1917.
18. “Operation for Boy Would Block Taint.” Chicago Examiner, Nov. 18, 1915.
19. “Opinion Divided on Killing Babies Deformed or Imbecile, as Chicago Doctor Says He Is Doing in Mercy.” Washington Post, Nov. 18, 1917.
20. “Physician Assists Patients to Die.” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 12, 1917.
21. “Physician Lets Second Defective Child Die, Rather Than Operate.” Washington Post, Jul. 25, 1917.
22. “Physician Who Sentenced Babe Defies Coroner.” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 14, 1917.
23. “Question Doctor’s Power Over Life and Death.” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20, 1915.
24. “Save Abnormal Baby.” Washington Post, Jul. 29, 1917.
25. “Surgeon Lets Baby, Born to Idiocy, Die.” New York Times, Jul. 25, 1917.
26. “Threatens Arrest if the Baby Dies.” Washington Post, Nov. 14, 1917.
27. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Euthanasia Program.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Last updated Aug. 18, 2015. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005200.
28. “Will Rule on Life or Death for Baby.” Washington Post, Dec. 26, 1917.

Previously on Biopolitical Times:

• Forgotten Stories of the Eugenic Age #4, Part 2: The Black Stork Rises: Dr. Haiselden's Celebrity and Public Controversy
• Forgotten Stories of the Eugenic Age #4, Part 1: The Short Life and Eugenic Death of Baby John Bollinger
• Forgotten Stories of the Eugenic Age #3: Divorce, "Crying Off," and the Perils of Eugenic Perfection

Image by Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915